


A Measure of a Man; a Dram of a Demon

by ERNest



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Crowley is a nervous wreck and we love and support him, Crowley's Fall (Good Omens), Crowley's Plants (Good Omens), Free Will, Gardens & Gardening, M/M, Mentioned Hastur (Good Omens), Mentioned Ligur (Good Omens), Self-Discovery, Self-Doubt, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-07-25 17:44:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20029801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: To be a demon is to always move through the worldasa demon. Crowley cannot take that part of himself off, but he can hang other elements on it, and see what that gets him.





	1. Come Bitter Conduct

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired by [drawlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight)'s incredible collection of intertwined ficlets, I Will Get Up Now And Go About The City. I think it's fair to say that my Crowley would be entirely different if I hadn't read and fallen in love with that version. Less of a wreck, for one thing, but less tender too.

A demon is not a job description; a demon is a conceptualization of self. Part nametag stitched through every article of clothing to brand the skin, and part conceptual coatrack on which to drape everything else, to be a demon is to always move through the world _as_ a demon.

A demon who is not actively sinning (or causing others to sin) is as much a demon as a writer who is not actively writing is still a writer. It’s baked into the bones, scrawled onto the skeleton, and the practice of the craft is enough to make the practitioner into a _tool_ of the craft.

That’s not the kind of thing a person can just shimmy out of at the end of a long exhausting day. Faceted eyes and slit-sealed eyes and black jelly eyes are not contact lenses, nor are hollow fetid pits prosthetics. It would have to change how _anything_ is seen and therefore processed and responded to.

This particular demon also wouldn’t be himself if he were not a bundle of nerves stuffed into a fake but expensive-looking leather wallet. To be Anthony J. Crowley is to be constantly aware of what other people think, and to care about the opinions of one person in particular.

-/-/-

A person –- _any_ person -– is also formed of their history. One of the first things Crowley did was to spill himself across the sky like juniper berries; one of the most recent was to muddle rosemary into his gin like a galaxy. And in between those arguably defining moments have been plenty of others in a glittering and never complete constellation.

Here he stands alone on a hill with his hands stuffed into his pockets as his roving eye traces the path of a shooting star, or his hands move in a blur to help explain the concept of redshift or supernovas, or he closes his eyes behind his shades against the horror of Columbia. Here he orders a jug of house brown in a voice immediately recognized by the only person who matters, or gets blind drunk and still can’t stop seeing the things they’ve been getting up to in Spain, or just tipsy enough for it he asks to learn the gavotte. And plants – the juniper and rosemary and violets and such? Yes. Look.

His is a garden, ripe and bursting forth, each blessed part of it never before touched by eyes or questing fingers or the soft scales of an underbelly. His is a garden, luxurious even in the dark, leaves trembling and touched as little as possible, for they are as damned as he. His is a garden, or more of an orchard, really, each tree planted a uniform distance away from its neighbors, his pruning shears primed for citrus and nothing on the grounds of apple. His is not a garden, for he chose the nursery instead as a place to cultivate young minds and trim back the undergrowth of the Apocalypse, but the garden is his too, because it is where he finds his heart.

-/-/-

Crowley has no free will, or that’s what they all keep telling him, so it doesn’t mean anything much when he does something bad or even something good. But the humans, those brilliant rising apes, have had it from the beginning, as integral to their being as atoms are, and Crowley makes a point to never touch that part of them.

Hastur and Ligur do it all the time and some part of him _does_ recognize that it’s a kind of art to plant a thought or a compulsion and let them think they came up with it themselves. But how much _more_ satisfying to push circumstances until they’re at the breaking point and his target really does come up with it themselves? Surely sin is much more damning when it was your own choice, when no one made you pull the trigger but yourself.

And besides, he’d never dare say but thinks about anyway, if they _couldn’t_ choose, if he _took_ that away from them, then what exactly would make them any different from him? Oh, there’s the wings and the ability to exert his will over electronics and other inanimate objects but that’s _nothing_, that’s just electrons, that doesn’t define a self. But if he follows that thought too far then he’ll start to wonder if he too could be worthy of grace, capable of it, even. And that’s a dangerous place to go.

Crowley cannot be forgiven. Not if he wants to stay the same person, and he’s already suffered through the howling splendor of reconstruction once, thank you very much. To be envesselled already and then poured out like molten lead; to be nowhere and nothing for a sickening time before being dumped again into a place that may be the same container roughly reworked or may be something entirely different; to not know which one it is and to not even know if you are inside this form or if the form _is_ you. It’s all unbearable and he cannot imagine that a sudden onset of holiness is any more pleasant.

No, he’ll stay a demon, even if he hates being one most of the time.


	2. Maker's Mark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 8/8/2019 I've been thinking a lot about embodiment and what gender would mean to a genderless being, so this addition just sort of spilled out of me.

A history makes a soul makes stars and questions at the same time makes a Fall makes a sad misshapen thing makes a snake makes a mistake makes a banishment makes a curse makes a humanish form.

And all that’s come before gives that human-shaped demon too many bones or not enough, and hair the color of rust of flame of a fall, and a brain boiling with anxiety, and an inability to stay still or stay upright or stay quiet or stay satisfied, and a drive to be cool to be needed to be heard to be left _alone_.

Then, of course, it doubles back on itself. The soul may have made a form for itself initially, but form shapes nature so the soul begins to think of itself as an extension of these neurons and this voicebox and this skeleton instead of the other way around. His snake self shrinks from a puppeteer to a tattoo, and hands become easier to operate than wings.

While this didn’t spring from nothing, the Serpent of Eden becomes ever more nervous and bold, and the corporeal self gets into the habit of muscle memory. It’s _all_ history, it’s _all_ Soul, and now, newly and increasingly, it’s all body and mind as well.

-/-/-

Crowley is a genderless being, Crowley is a woman, Crowley is a man, Crowley is a fluid entity, Crowley is neutrois, Crowley is bigender, and Crowley is void and formless. Crowley grasps for pronouns and discards them just as quickly, and Crowley lets people think whatever they want in the space between body and language.

It’s all just words put to a self and an existence that has historically been Wordless so there is little point to making sure that those words ““fit”” the form that has been chosen in the moment. And even those forms are approximations, certainly unable to hold an aura, but _perhaps_ able to contain half a reflection.

So who’s to say the ““gendered”” characteristics are the reflection? Maybe it’s the metabolism or the sensitivity to cold or the body’s personal bubble or the neural pathways that have been crafted out of ether. Maybe it’s the animal that humanoid face brings to mind, or glory and grace translated to gold flakes on a forehead or forearm. Gender and sex are such _small_ things after all, for the ethereal or the occult.

-/-/-

The Serpent of Eden knows the score. He is the crown jewel of this whole fellowship _and_ he was made to be a thing reviled. Only in Hell, he thinks, would such a contradiction be not only possible but de rigeur. So he crawls on his belly to hide the brightest part of himself and licks up the dry dust ahead of him on the path he makes for himself.

His wiles are most effective when no one notices him enacting them, but it _does_ get lonely so he finds himself pathetically grateful for the attention, even if that comes as swift kicks or a cry of frustration. Infamy isn’t as good as fame, but it’s heaps better than obscurity. Obscurity would mean he’s expendable, replaceable, and he knows what happens to the trash that not even G-d’s cast out garbage wants. So he makes sure he is seen to be doing _something_.


End file.
